Last week in Northern California a thirty-five-year-old man was driving drunk and recklessly at night on a two-lane motorway. He was speeding and overtaking cars ahead of him, crossing over the double-yellow lines. A vehicle traveling the other direction was being driven by a twenty-two-year-old female college student, who was returning to Sonoma after attending a family dinner. The drunk driver collided with the girl and she died in the accident. The drunk driver survived and was taken to jail and is now facing murder charges, and most likely will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Although intoxication-induced tragedies occur regularly, they speak to an ongoing theme amongst humanity that is as historical as it is universal: our fallibility as individuals. We are the accumulation of our actions, and each decision we make can add or subtract from the meaningfulness and completeness of our lives. If we are prone to vice and give in too often to bad habits, we increase the probability that we may squander our lives a physical or mental prison. Each day humans knowingly make choices that lead to the demise of themselves, each other, or the natural world. As one who has himself often failed to make the right choices in order to reach my full potential, I understand that we are highly susceptible to taking the easy way out. But the easy way is often the less stimulating and constructive way, and leads to a life rife with regrets and guilt. On a grander scale, taking the easy way out could translate into taking actions deleterious to entire nations or ecosystems, and result in the destruction of humanity and nature. All too often it seems that in our individual and collective lives we are walking dangerously close to the edge, and that even in the good times the monkey’s off our backs but the circus is still in town.

As with our personal lives, if our species is going to reach our maximum potential filled with meaningfulness and beauty, we cannot take the easy way out. At the current rate of environmental destruction, saber-rattling, and war-mongering, it’s unlikely that we will make it very far down the road to collective success. If we continue to make the wrong choices and fail to do the work that needs to be done, we may indeed end-up confined to a cell or dead as victims of our own undoing. In effort to avoid making the mistake of embarking down the wrong road, a useful exercise is to occasionally imagine what we would lose if we were to falter in life or as a species. I sometimes try to think about what I would lose if I were to fail in achieving my objectives. Beyond the betrayal to myself and my family, in my mental exercises I try to imagine the implications of losing my freedom to no longer enjoy the outdoors. Never again would I be able to see the colors of the twilight - the orange and blue bands which paint the purple sky, the rising craterous moon and the black silhouette of urchin trees which stand against the backdrop of space. Never again would I hear the song of the crickets and frogs as awakening bats and owls swooping through the indigo sky, nor see night sky festooned with shimmering stars and meteors skiving against the atmosphere of this miraculous planet. How beautiful this world is, how vast the range of lifeforms which have evolved and perished throughout the span on time on Earth. May that be the case for as long as possible.

The Palisades Trail to Oat Mine, which winds through the eastern portion of Robert Louis Stevenson State Park in the Mayacama Mountains above Calistoga, is one of the most stunning and challenging hiking experiences in the Sonoma/Napa area. Earlier this month I hiked above the beaten path of the trail and explored the volcanic plateaus above the cliffs. I climbed up a dry gully at a snail’s pace, taking cautious steps out of concern for encountering and disturbing any possible rattlesnakes. Of greater concern was of running into a mountain lion, which I simultaneously wanted to see and did not want to see. As I came across more and more mountain lion scat in the higher realms of the cliffs, my sentiments gravitated heavily toward the not wanting to see side of the mountain lion encountering spectrum. The cliffs are comprised of volcanic rock which resemble muddy magma solidified in time; rock which has pancaked, buckled, and folded into itself to form a wrinkly, dense, and craterous crust. That there was not another hiker in sight throughout this strange volcanic moonscape did not concern me, but the paranoia being attacked by a territorial predator did (thought the true threat was dehydration). The cliffs plateaued out into arid plain with rock spires rising up like ziggurats or obelisks, and fault lines stretched out toward the peripheral cinder cones. I sensed a moderately weird and spooky energy generating from that environment, though in retrospect I’m sure this was all in my head. I’m disinclined toward believing in paranormal activities, but isolated in that alien hinterland amidst the surreal rock formations, a martian spacecraft landing or sasquatch sighting would have been understandable. In the eerie desolation of tinderbox mountains, I felt as though I had embarked on a brief vision quest, only without the hallucinations or any ensuing epiphany. I felt as though something ominous lurched just beyond the badlands, but perhaps that was just the sound of static electricity from the power lines, or the cognitive dissonance in my head.

In the tidepools of the subtropical island of Waiheke (population: 8,500), which lies thirteen miles outside of Auckland in New Zealand’s Hauraki Gulf, are microcosms of marine life which seem to exist in such independence and isolation from one another that it would appear as though the various tidepools are like islands unto themselves. Protected from the waves by lichen-covered rocks, the myriad saltwater residents of the tide pools live in relative peace and security in their tiny littoral wonderlands. Crabs nestle in the niches and crevasses of boulders, with aggregations of baby crabs conglomerating under stones. Sponges, starfish, sea anemones, and barnacles anchor themselves along the seaweed-rich edges of surge channels, where the water level is constantly changing with the tides and thus flushing in the nutrients and out the waste. The tidepools are filled with forests of red coralline algae, which provides protection for a range of mollusks, namely the whelks and periwinkles, sea snails which have established entire villages and hamlets within the shallow coral forests and scurry amongst the fragmented bones of their kin and ancestors, amongst the calcified skeletons of their brethren, many of whose shells have be repurposed by florescent hermit crabs whom wander the sandy bottoms like street urchins scouring through the rubble of their once intact and now disintegrating city. Chitons (my personal favorite phylum of mollusks) thrive among the shoreline rocks of Waiheke, and, for reasons of preservation, I hope that doesn't change anytime soon.

Mere communion with nature, mere contact with the free air, exercise a soothing yet comforting and strengthening influence on the wearied mind, calm the storm of passion, and soften the heart when shaken by sorrow to its inmost depths.

-Alexander von Humboldt

Up in Northern California’s Humboldt county (named after the once-famed and highly-esteemed Prussian adventurer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt; read The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf, and Humboldt’s own Views of Nature), live Earth’s tallest trees (100+ meter Sequoia sempervirens, aka coastal redwoods, which can grow taller than the London Big Ben clock tower which gets blown up at the end of V for Vendetta), which are also some of the oldest living organisms (lifespan: 1,200 – 1,800 years or more) on the planet (unless you subscribe to James Lovelock’s reasonable Gaia hypothesis, which posits that Earth is an sovereign organism unto itself, thus is in and within itself the single oldest living entity, weighing-in at 4.5 billion years-old and god knows how many pounds.) The upturned trunks of fallen redwoods the size of school buses, with their shallow root systems exposed and with ferns and small trees growing from the decomposing bark (within which live whole colonies of ants and other insects), look like great centerpieces in the forest.

The soaring old growth redwoods are but one expression of the gigantic flora flourishing in the northland wilderness that are Humboldt and Del Norte counties. Along the coast there are ferns taller than pickup trucks and starfish larger than saucers and frying pans. My friend and I, both self-professed expert campers who just happened to forget our flashlights and headlamps, arrived to our Patrick Point’s campsite at night, and after struggling to set-up our tents in the dark, went to sleep. (I’ve always enjoyed the experience of arriving in new destination very late at night, going to sleep, and then waking up early to explore a place that you have never been to.) Awaking in my tent at Patrick’s Point, the squawking birds and green hues were reminiscent of a tropical jungle, and when I stepped out of my tent the encompassing evergreens and boulders seemed disproportionally larger than usual. It felt as though I was a miniature person standing in a giant terrarium and playground. Layers and layers of vegetation covered the boulders like hanging gardens, and the bright green tips of new growth festooned the branch tips of native trees.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Patrick’s Point is the burgeoning tidepool life, particularly that of the massive starfish population. Along the shores of Sonoma and Mendocino country it’s rare, if not impossible, to find a single starfish living amongst the rocky shores (wasting syndrome is probably a significant factor), yet the Humboldt coast was rich with sea stars. It has been many years since I’ve seen such healthy tidepool populations anywhere, and I can only assume that in recent decades the sea star population has dwindled along the California coastline and that had we visited Patrick’s Point (or any point along American continents where the western shores kiss the Pacific Ocean) a century ago our minds would have been blown by the then-incredible extent and variety of intertidal marine life (having said that, I have never visited Patagonia, and would relish the opportunity to explore the tidepools there). Through time and space the mind wanders, and standing amongst the tallest trees on Earth one wonders: have there ever been taller trees throughout Earth’s history, or are these the tallest (after all, the blue whale is larger than most extinct dinosaurs, so we may as well assume that these trees are the amongst the largest to ever grace the surface of the Earth)? Such a comparison of conditions of ecological health can also be made in the river systems of Humboldt County versus that of other popular rivers in Northern California. The Smith River, which runs through Jedidiah Smith State Park and out to the sea, is perhaps one of the clearest and cleanest rivers I have ever swam in or seen. Whereas the Russian River in west Sonoma, which seems clean enough, appears dirty enough by comparison that my little niece once questioned me as to veracity of its name, saying, “I thought it was called Restroom River.”

The quaint town of Mendocino is one the various manmade gems along the Northern California coast (albeit the gem designation is due to its setting in an area of extreme natural beauty, something that humans had no part in creating, for the town is located upon a unique headland facing the magnificent Pacific Ocean to the west, and to the east are evergreen forests engulfing the hills, and along the coast which is festooned with colorful wildflowers there are rocky outcroppings and meadow-bluffs that kiss the turquoise sea in which enormous kelp forest coves punctured by sea caves harbor a spectacular range of shorebirds and marine life). Developed by the influx of loggers who expelled the native Pomo Indian settlement in the area in the 1850s, Mendocino is now a heavily touristed town which has retained an antiquated, antebellum character demonstrated nicely by the historic Mendocino Inn, a place that is throwback to the good-old-days when obdurate men on horseback rode to the town saloon for a whiskey drink and then moseyed on over to the brothel where belladonna whores in flowing dresses greeted them and miserly Chinese men named Ching scurried around suspiciously with surprising efficacy and financial success in venues that would in later decades be frequented by men armed with tommy guns and donning striped suits like those worn by the actors cast in the film Dick Tracy.

Aside from the saloons and brothels, Mendocino offers close proximity to Big River, which runs ten miles inland from the bay. At the mouth of the river the freshwater flows into and meets the saltwater coursing in from the ocean, and the riverbed is comprised of white sand, which imbues the water with hints of aquamarine and teal, and also hosts the occasional stand of bull kelp. The bright aquatic colors and kelp stands continue to appear upriver until the saltwater transitions into the more freshwater-dominated riparian environment, which is submerged in chlorophyll hues from forested riverbanks lined by reeds and cloaked by arching trees and underlying serene algae-laden waters. Nevertheless, as you make your way upriver you are reminded of its brackish composition by the presence of seals resting on the logs and sandbars of the river; also in the redwood canopies above where dozens of cormorant nests may occupy a single tree, indicating that the sea is not far off for the cormorant is indeed a shorebird if there ever was one. Further upriver, freshwater animals, such as painted turtles and river otters inhabit the log-jammed flanks, and they retreat at your incoming presence.

The river was once used as a channel to transport the thousands of ancient redwood trees hacked down in the environmentally devastating ecocide that was the erstwhile Big River logging industry, the resulting lumber having been used for the construction of myriad homes in San Francisco. Old logging ruins can still be seen as you paddle inland, and none of the old growth trees exist anymore. One wonders what it looked when the giant two-thousand year-old redwoods were still standing along the banks of the river. What prolific and glorious wildlife there must have been before those bastards got their fucking hands and saws on those sacrosanct trees. Not only that, one wonders what the Mendocino coast and surrounding sea must have been like before the whalers and the seal hunters came poaching for blubber like bloodthirsty drunken madmen. Perhaps the Pomo Indians could have told us, but they’re all gone now, gone or working in casinos or K-Marts, having all but lost the spiritual connection to the natural world that their ancestors must have possessed when they walked along the banks of Big River prior to its mechanized-induced upheaval and mutilation (I was about to say transformation, but that’s too ambiguous, for it could imply something good). Still, you can kayak Big River and appreciate for what is it now, and once you get far enough upriver, far away from everything and anyone civilized, if you close your eyes you can imagine what it was like before the trees were fell, and that vision will put smile on your sunlit face. And if you want, you can think about what it may be like down the road, and that prospect may make your cringe and shake your head, for the fate of the Earth and the natural world – Big River included – is looking grim.